Will It Play in Poway? Arts Center Jury Still Out : Culture: Fourteen months and umpteen surprises later, it remains unclear whether the city and its neighbors will support the $8.4-million facility.

It’s a little like diapering a baby. Easy if you know what you’re doing.

But Poway’s baby was a big one, born May 12, 1990, after eight years of labor and as full of surprises as any newborn.

Bob Thomas, Poway’s community services director, recalls the first time he saw the bill for gas and lighting at the city’s new Center for the Performing Arts. It was running $100,000 a year.

And that was merely the beginning of surprises involving the $8.4-million center on the Poway High School campus. Fourteen months after its opening, the verdict is not yet in on whether Poway and its neighbors will support this home-grown cultural effort. Some indicators:

* A nonprofit fund-raising organization formed in 1988 has raised nearly $500,000 in cash and pledges but has fallen far short of its goals.

* Competition for dollars and patrons has surfaced in Escondido to the north. The City Council there has committed redevelopment funds to the construction of a massive cultural arts center, including two performance theaters, by the end of 1993.

* During the Poway center’s first 13 1/2 months, its 155 events averaged slightly fewer than 300 viewers per performance, less than half the 800-seat capacity.

“This year has been a learning experience,” said Thomas, the city’s overseer of the center. “Some things we thought would go over big disappointed us, and others were just the opposite.”

Crooner Mel Torme drew a sellout crowd of 809, and the Poway High production of “The Music Man” packed in an average of 675 people per show during four performances in the theater’s six-week opening celebration.

The Kingston Trio did virtually as well as Torme at two performances July 13 and 14 in a Muscular Dystrophy Assn. benefit.

Some of the unexpected draws were dance groups, local and touring, which consistently attracted healthy audiences. Losers included family-oriented children’s shows, which have been dropped from the upcoming season.

“We have become a mecca for dance groups,” said Barry Hamlin, the theater’s technical director. “I guess we are just the right size and have the equipment they need.”

In an effort to draw more residents, the center will hold an open house during the annual Poway Days next fall. Center officials say they have yet to tap the large segment of the population that is attracted to the rodeos, barbecues and hoedowns featured at the traditional celebration of the community’s cow-town roots.

The electric bills were easier to tackle.

“We made some immediate changes,” Thomas said. Offices were enclosed, and the interior of the two-story building, with its soaring ceilings and spacious theater, were no longer heated and cooled when not in use. The imposing chrome and glass foyer no longer blazes with light each night.

The arts center has been in the red since opening, but that’s not unusual for a new fine arts center, Thomas said.

Fund raising was hurt because the money raised went to repay city loans rather than to improve the facility or its offerings. That stumbling block was removed in October when the City Council agreed to forgive most of the center’s debts and to permit all money raised in the future to go for improvements and upkeep.

One problem that has not been resolved is how to finance the operating costs of the center.

“We realize that we need more than just the Poway area to support the performing arts center,” Thomas said. “We need the entire mid-county region.”

In May, the fund-raising group changed its name from the Poway Foundation for the Performing Arts to Arts Alive! after finding that potential donors from neighboring communities were less willing to give to a Poway-based group.

Poway has a population of about 45,000. The mid-county region, which Thomas defined as Ramona, Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos, Carmel Mountain Ranch, Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa, has a population of 150,000 to 200,000--”plenty to support a facility of our size.”

However, in trying to draw that audience, Poway will have some new competition, this time not from downtown but from Escondido, which is building its own, more ambitious performing arts center.

“That doesn’t concern us much,” Poway City Manager Jim Bowersox said. Although Escondido borders on the Poway center’s mid-county turf, the Escondido Cultural Arts complex will complement the Poway facility, not compete with it, Bowersox said.

Escondido is building a 1,500-seat theater and a 400-seat theater, so Poway’s 800-seat Performing Arts Center fits right in the middle, he said.

Different sizes of theaters offer different types of performances, Bowersox said, and there should be little conflict.

“Besides, we’ve got a three-year head start on them,” he added.